A mix of musical temperaments
Airi Suzuki to play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto as Douglas Bostock leads the orchestra
The three composers for the next Royal Bangkok Symphony Orchestra, on Feb 28, could not be more dissimilar personally — or more alike historically.
Felix Mendelssohn was rich, refined, a child genius of Germany’s Jewish aristocracy, who composed music as effortlessly as he danced in the ballroom. Master of languages and literature, a graceful conductor and pianist, a traveller to exotic caves and waterfalls, a friend of Queen Victoria, King Frederic and Sir Walter Scott, his only shortcoming was that, even though he did so much in so short a time, he died when only 38 years old.
His friend Robert Schumann was moody, philosophical, unstable. His every note was a picture for a character in literature, or his own desperation or ebullience. (Today, he would be called manic-depressive.) Schumann would have been as great a pianist as his wife, but in his enthusiasm, he worked with a new invention that crippled his right hand. Madness began with syphilis, continued with attempts at suicide, and finally he died after almost three years in a lunatic asylum. Along with his composing, he became an esteemed music critic, “discovering” none other than the young ambitious Johannes Brahms.
Johannes Brahms didn’t exactly return the compliment, since, with Robert Schumann in the loony-bin, he almost certainly had an affair with Schumann’s wife. Still, he was the “bourgeois” of the three. True, his first professional piano-playing was in a Hamburg brothel, but once his name became known, he lived up to his reputation. His idol was Beethoven, so, while he was certainly an artist of his time, his music was more formal, almost classical, until cancer took his life in 1897 at the age of 63.
As different as their personalities were, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms were certainly alike in being the most representative composers of Germanic Orchestral Romanticism. In France, Hector Berlioz was painting Technicolor-like pictures with his orchestra. From Poland and Majorca, Frederick Chopin composed dreams on the piano. But from Hamburg to Dresden to Vienna, these three encompassed romanticism, pictorialisation.
The writer Thomas Mann described music before the Romantics (such as Mozart, Bach and early Beethoven) as “small-town piping”. The music that will be played here by the RBSO, said Mann, might be “contact with the great world of the mind”. One might not agree, but no doubt these three composers opened up another world for the concert-hall.
Brahms might have regretted being called a “romantic” (he believed music after him, like Richard Wagner, was heading for the trash-can), but his Academic Festival Overture was anything but academic. In fact, it harked back to his years playing piano in those houses of ill repute.
The composer, who never went to college, was offered a doctorate in (translated from the Latin) “Leading German Music Of The Most Severe Order”. How did Brahms respond? He wrote the Academic Festival Overture consisting entirely of university beer-drinking songs! Bangkok audiences might not recognise them, but each tune in the overture — played quite seriously — is actually a comic tune sung by college-age drunkards in their beer-cellars. True, many of these songs — including the final Gaudeamus Igitor — date back to the 13th century, but to these students, they were all part of the great German tradition.
The following Mendelssohn Violin Concerto that night is hardly “fun”, but this, the first “romantic” violin concerto (Beethoven’s was written in his “classical” period) was exuberant and melodic. And as the first composer to link all three movements, he was saying, in effect, “More than showing off the skills of the performer, I want this to be a monument to exuberance, youth and joy”.
Apparently soloist Airi Suzuki has all three attributes. Born in Tokyo 28 years ago, she took up the violin at the age of four and at the age of 17, she was already a prize-winner at the prestigious Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition. After that, and her debut recital in Japan, she went to Germany, to study at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. There she won another prize at the Joseph Joachim Violin Concerto, and proceeded to perform with all the Japanese orchestras, as well as the Poznan Symphony Orchestra on a tour of Poland.
Since that time, she has performed recitals at the famous Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and as a soloist with many Japanese and European orchestras, including the NDR Radio-Philharmonic Hanover, Munich Chamber Orchestra, and other international ensembles. She is currently assistant concertmaster with the NDR Radio Philharmonic Hanover. While her repertoire is wide, her first concerto with international orchestras was the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, to be played here.
The conductor for all three works is Douglas Bostock, an extremely familiar name in Bangkok. After his work here in 2017, Maestro Bostock created the first Conducting Master Class and Conductor Competition at Silpakorn University. Starting this September, he will become a part-time member of Silpakorn University as head of the international conducting faculty.
Born in Cheshire, England, Mr Bostock became one of the last pupils of the esteemed conductor Sir Adrian Boult. His positions have been extensive. He was music director and principal conductor of the Czech Chamber Philharmonic and principal conductor of the Munich Symphony Orchestra, as well as principal conductor of the Aargau Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland.
For several years, he has been guest conductor of the Tokyo University of the Arts.
His most substantial work in length here will be from the mercurial, poetic Robert Schumann. While his First Symphony is subtitled Spring, this Second Symphony could be called Autumn, for the composer was in a bad mood. During a tour of Russia, he was annoyed that his wife Clara was more famous than he was. Robert was also — like many visitors today — sick of the food, and tired of the travelling. After this trip, the couple moved to Dresden, which was warmer and prettier.
Not that it made much difference. Schumann started this symphony with a stern first theme, with unrest during the whole first movement. The second movement was faster, in better spirits. But for the slow movement, Schumann had a confession.
“I’m still half-sick,” he wrote to a friend. “And I’m afraid my illness shows up in every note.”
Do not fear, listener. This was simply the Romantic composer exaggerating his feelings and his maladies. Nor did he regret his artistry and his mortality, and in one confession foretold his own future.
“I hope,” he said to a friend, “that, like the nightingale, I shall sing myself to death.”
Born in Tokyo 28 years ago, she took up the violin at the age of four and at the age of 17, she was already a prize- winner at the prestigious Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition